Private/public cloud costs: a summary tablehttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/privatepublic-cloud-costs-a-summary-table/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/privatepublic-cloud-costs-a-summary-table/#commentsWed, 29 Aug 2012 11:54:25 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=731I had the great pleasure to converse on twitter along with the exceptional Simon Wardley, a longtime expert and researcher on company innovation, evolution and.. cloud computing. Among the limit of 140 characters, it was quite difficult to convey any sensible concept in such a short space. One of the interesting thing is that it is difficult to provide a sensible comparison between private and public clouds in absence of real numbers. So, since we just finished a research report for a major UK public authority, I will just add my own 2 eurocents and present a summary table of some examples of private, public and dedicated cluster costs:

System

$/Core-hour

Hopper [19]

$0.018

Montero-Llorente [31]

$0.04

Magellan (overall) [19]

$0.04

Class 1 server/workstation [7]

$0.046

Cornell RedCloud [53]

$0.058

Our estimate

$0.06

Amazon cc1.4xl, resv. instance

$0.062

Amazon cc1.4xl

$0.093

CINN [7]

$0.1

This is of course just a snippet of more than 40 pages; cost includes management and amortization over 3 years for hardware, 5 years for infrastructure. Our own estimate is for a self-managed, self-assembled system with no best practices, while Magellan is a realistic estimate of a median cost for a well-managed and well-procured infrastructure. Hopper is a custom cluster out of commodity hardware and can be considered the best approachable price point for 2011 in terms of cost/core for a private cloud as well. In the paper (that I hope will be published soon) there will be additional details on the actual model, the estimates and the sources for the data. Hope it may be useful for someone.

]]>http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/privatepublic-cloud-costs-a-summary-table/feed/0Naughton, Android, the GPL and why I’m fuzzy minded.http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/naughton-android-the-gpl-and-why-im-fuzzy-minded/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/naughton-android-the-gpl-and-why-im-fuzzy-minded/#commentsFri, 11 Nov 2011 08:10:20 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=704Edward Naughton latest attack (pdf) on Android/Bionic and his claims that the GPL license has been violated are bordering on ridiculous. First of all, to simply claim that dissenters are “fuzzy minded” because we don’t supinely believe that Google is evil incarnate, that the GPL has been eviscerated, and that we are all going to die in a proprietary/parasitic world is, well, bogus. Brian Proffitt made an excellent response, that calmly provides a reasonable background and some doubts – may it be possible that the author has some motives? Say, like the suspicions previously raised around Florian Mueller? The real problem of the article is that… it’s lame, weak and takes innuendo and unrelated comments to weave them into a “proof”. I hate this kind of FUD. I hated it when Stallman did it, I hated it when Microsoft did it (“see? all those companies that licensed patents from us? It’s the proof Linux infringes!”) and now we have to endure another similar effort.

Let’s start with the biggest problem: “As I explained in detail in my first paper, Google’s approach works only if the cleaning process removes all of the copyrightable material from every one of the headers” and then goes on to show that in his opinion there are still parts that are not “pure headers”. He makes a quite simple logical error: to claim that macros are by default copyrightable. The problem is that some macros are implemented like that for technical reasons-in fact, there are no alternative, equally efficient ways to implement them in the same way. “The court explains that elements dictated by efficiency are removed from consideration based on the merger doctrine which states that a form of expression that is incidental to the idea can not be protected by copyright. In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protected by copyright” (from: Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc.)
So, macros like those dangerously incriminating ones that Naughton believes it saw in Google indiscriminate attitude towards copyright – well, they are still unprotected, or at least (as Brian Proffitt cleary wrote in his piece) no judge expressed his views on this.

Just this point defuses most of the damning argumentation rised in the white paper – like the fact that “Google optimized the scripts for convenience and not copyright compliance”. Some other points: “Google’s decision to remove some functions and variables but to retain others depending on how it affected performance shows that they were playing fast and loose with copyright.” – no, it shows that you have an axe to grind.

“Some who criticized my analysis relied on cases in which an abstraction-filtration-comparison analysis was used, but, as Judge Alsup’s order recognized, that approach is used when the issue is the copying of non-literal elements. It doesn’t generally apply to instances of literal copying like this one. See Lotus Development Corp. v. Borland International Inc., 49 F.3d 807, 814-15 (1st Cir.
1995).”
First of all, Judge Alsup had not ordered something like “Google copied”. It just refused to grant a preliminary injunction on the copyrightability of APIs, and this is due largely to the problem of conflicting presentation of APIs from Oracle and Google (inclusive versus exclusive). And the Lotus v. Borland was not considering the AFC test because… it regarded USER INTERFACES. Not Application Programmer Interfaces. Naughton kindly sweeps the issue under the carpet, as it would remove the filtration test… and filter out much of his white paper.
In fact, all the rest is unnecessary drivel designed to demonstrate the strength of his analysis: “To be sure, the WordPress situation involved different technical details than the kernel headers, but…” (but what?)

“I have practical concerns as well: Google’s approach, if it works, provides a roadmap for bypassing the GPL, as well as a relatively simple set of customizable scripts that could allow easier exploitation of GPL components by proprietary programs. An easy bypass of GPL protections runs contrary to what FOSS advocates stand for, and I certainly would not have expected such an uncritical defense of Google.” Where, oh where, is this kind of thing possible? The author takes something that is possible for headers only, takes his own view of Google as a dastardly stealer of code, and takes it to the next level: “see! If we don’t stop them now, they will find a way to clean GPL code as well as headers! We’re doomed, like Tivo!”

I tried to write down a response that did not involve biological paraphrases, but I failed. Let’s say that the argument is not his strongest point.

(footnote: I don’t care particularly for Google, I have no financial interest for them, but I respect the contributions they made to OSS.)

]]>http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/naughton-android-the-gpl-and-why-im-fuzzy-minded/feed/0It could have been different: Android, Google and all thathttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/it-could-have-been-different-android-google-and-all-that/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/it-could-have-been-different-android-google-and-all-that/#commentsTue, 12 Jul 2011 11:06:27 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=667If there’s one thing that is totally clear, is that Android is ravaging the smartphone market, and all those that are feeling the heat are trying to use the most innovative and transparent approach to stop it: sue Google and its partners out in the oblivion. Software patents, design patents, copyrights, plain trolling- anything goes if it can help in stop the Droid juggernaut. At the same time, Google is under attack for its delay in publishing the Honeycomb source code, attacked for the half-backed results that can be witnessed in some tablet products, all of this in an environment where Android phone makers are obtaining extraordinary revenues, in large part thanks to those contested products (Samsung comes to mind).

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and it’s easy to “predict” that the extraordinary success of Android would have generated such a defensive attack. It is however at least predictable, given the extreme litigation of software companies, that patents would have been used as a blunt instrument to fend off competitors. Could things have been different? I believe so, and I also believe that Google made some errors in its decision, especially in trying to create a control point (the “Google experience”) instead of favoring a more long-term vision.

Let’s start from the beginning. Android is two things at once; from one side it is a collection of many, many different open source projects, some external, some Google-created, some heavily modified and adapted specifically for the purpose. There is a separate, private tree (at the moment the 3.x branch) that is also based on open source projects, but is at the moment internal to Google and the partners that decided to join its Open Handset Alliance. Some projects are clearly behind their open counterparts, especially WebKit, while at the same time maintaining substantial external off-tree patches that are extremely difficult to integrate like in the Linux Kernel. There is an additional layer of totally proprietary apps, that are installable only for those partners (and phones) that subjugate themselves to an additional set of requirements and licensing rules, something that for example caused lots of problems for Motorola and Google in the SkyHook lawsuit. This will probably continue, and will be the real battleground, given the fact that Android and iOS are clearly emerging as the leading platforms.

Could it have been different? I think so. And by releasing some degree of control, Google could have created a much safer and open environment, while sacrificing very little. Let’s start with the point that what Google really, really wants is an unencumbered rich internet-enabled platform, that is not constrained by third parties, and that it uses Google services. The reality is that Google lives off advertising (at the moment, at last) and is trying to expand it to other services, like enterprise mail, documents, and so on; there are two roads to do that: the first is to create a platform that is strongly tied to Google services, so that it is nearly impossible to escape its control. In doing so, however, you face the tension of the OEM and vendors that may want to switch services, or that want to push internally developed offerings. In this case, they will have nothing left to do but to go with the competition, or create their own variant (something thatalready happened) increasing the adoption costs.

The alternative is the “A rising tide lifts all boats” – make it a purely open source project, where there is a real distributed control, like Eclipse. Turn it to the Apache foundation. Make all the interested partners a part of the foundation or consortium, make the code public (with limited exceptions, like for prerelease hardware drivers) and try to track as much as possible the projects where you take things from. Apply a strict code contribution regime to strengthen your position against IP claims, and especially don’t turn it into a product. Yes, you read it properly- the code should be a strict open source project. This way, it would be extremely difficult for an external party to sue the “origin”, given the difficulties in identifying a directly derived infringing device; Google could have then (using this more sanitized and cleaner base) provided insurance through a third party for IP infringement claims, if the code base adopter would want to use such an opportunity (some may decide to fight on their own, of course). This implies that an Android OEM can substitute the Google services and use something else (that, by the way, is possible even now) but would have easily prevented most antitrust-based attacks. The purely open code base and the increased external participation would have further shortened the time-to-market for providing a new board to the marketplace, reduced adoption costs, and facilitated an external ecosystem of providers for Android based services.

Google could have at least avoided some of the worst blows, increased its credibility with the various OS communities, and reduced the cost of adopting Android for an OEM, pushing more and more the platform. This, in exchange for some of the tight control that currently Google exercise on the platform. Unfortunately, I think it’s too late for that; and we will still have to face the sad situation that the life of a mobile platform is dictated purely by judges.

]]>http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/it-could-have-been-different-android-google-and-all-that/feed/2Nokia is one of the most active Android contributors, and other surpriseshttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/nokia-is-one-of-the-most-active-android-contributors-and-other-surprises/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/nokia-is-one-of-the-most-active-android-contributors-and-other-surprises/#commentsFri, 22 Apr 2011 10:06:09 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=627Updated: added other examples from WebKit, IGEL and RIM

Yes, it may be a surprise, but that’s the beauty of Open Source – you never know where your contributions will be found. In this regard, I received a gentle mention from my friend Felipe Ortega of the Libresoft group of a nice snippet of research from Luis Canas Diaz, “Brief study of the Android community“. Luis studied the contributions to the Android code base, and splitted the contributions using the email of the originator, assigning those with “google.com” or “android.com” as internal, and classifying the others. Here is a sample of the results:

(Since October 2008)

# Commits

Domain

69297

google.com

22786

android.com

8815

(NULL)

1000

gmail.com

762

nokia.com

576

motorola.com

485

myriadgroup.com

470

sekiwake.mtv.corp.google.com

422

holtmann.org

335

src.gnome.org

298

openbossa.org

243

sonyericsson.com

152

intel.com

Luis added: “Having a look at the name of the domains, it is very surprising that Nokia is one of the most active contributors. This is a real paradox, the company that states that Android is its main competition helps it!. One of the effects of using libre software licenses for your work is that even your competition can use your code, currently there are Nokia commits in the following repositories:

git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/external/dbus

git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/external/bluetooth/bluez”

In fact, it was Nokia participation in Maemo (and later Meego) and its funding of the dbus and bluez extensions that were later taken up by Google for Android. Intrigued by this result, I made a little experiment: I cloned the full Android gingerbread GIT repo (2.3), separated the parts that are coming from preexisting projects like the Linux kernel and the various external dependencies (many tens of project – included, to my surprise, a full Quake source code…) leaving for example Chromium but removing WebKit. I then took apart the external projects, and counted Google contributions there in an approximate way, and folded back everything. You get a rough size of 1.1GB of source code directly developed or contributed by Google, which means that around 75% of the source code of Android comes from external projects. Not bad, in terms of savings.

Update: many people commented on the strangeness of having fierce competitors working together in ways that are somehow “friendly” towards a common goal. Some of my twitter followers also found the percentage of 75% of non-Google contributions to be high, and this update is meant to be an answer for both. First of all, there is quite a long history of competitors working together in open source communities; the following sample of Eclipse contributors provide an intial demonstration of that:

But there are many other examples as well. WebKit, theweb rendering component used in basically all the mobile platforms (except Windows Mobile) and on the desktop within Chrome and Safari was originally developed by the KDE free software community, taken by Apple and more recently co-developed by Nokia, Samsung, RIM and Google:

“KDE: KDE is an open source desktop environment and application development framework. The project to develop this software is an informal association. WebKit was originally created based on code from KDE’s KHTML and KJS libraries. Although the code has been extensively reworked since then, this provided the basic groundwork and seed code for the project. Many KDE contributors have also contributed to WebKit since it became an independent project, with plans that it would be used in KDE as well. This has included work on initially developing the Qt port, as well as developing the original code (KSVG2) that provides WebKit’s SVG support, and subsequent maintenance of that code.

Apple: Apple employees have contributed the majority of work on WebKit since it became an independent project. Apple uses WebKit for Safari on Mac OS X, iPhone and Windows; on the former two it is also a system framework and used by many other applications. Apple’s contribution has included extensive work on standards compliance, Web compatibility, performance, security, robustness, testing infrastructure and development of major new features.

Collabora: Collabora has worked on several improvements to the Qt and GTK+ ports since 2007, including NPAPI plugins support, and general API design and implementation. Collabora currently supports the development of the GTK+ port, its adoption by GNOME projects such as Empathy, and promotes its usage in several client projects.

Nokia: Nokia’s involvement with the WebKit project started with a port to the S60 platform for mobile devices. The S60 port exists in a branch of the public WebKit repository along with various changes to better support mobile devices. To date it has not been merged to the mainline. However, a few changes did make it in, including support for CSS queries. In 2008, Nokia acquired Trolltech. Trolltech has an extensive history of WebKit contributions, most notably the Qt port.

Google: Google employees have contributed code to WebKit as part of work on Chrome and Android, both originally secret projects. This has included work on portability, bug fixes, security improvements, and various other contributions.

Torch Mobile: Torch Mobile uses WebKit in the Iris Browser, and has contributed significantly to WebKit along the way. This has included portability work, bug fixes, and improvements to better support mobile devices. Torch Mobile has ported WebKit to Windows CE/Mobile, other undisclosed platforms, and maintains the QtWebKit git repository. Several long-time KHTML and WebKit contributors are employed by Torch Mobile.

Nuanti: Nuanti engineers contribute to WebCore, JavaScriptCore and in particular develop the WebKit GTK+ port. This work includes porting to new mobile and embedded platforms, addition of features and integration with mobile and desktop technologies in the GNOME stack. Nuanti believes that working within the framework of the webkit.org version control and bug tracking services is the best way of moving the project forward as a whole.

Igalia: Igalia is a free software consultancy company employing several core developers of the GTK+ port, with contributions including bugfixing, performance, accessibility, API design and many major features. It also provides various parts of the needed infrastructure for its day to day functioning, and is involved in the spread of WebKit among its clients and in the GNOME ecosystem, for example leading the transition of the Epiphany web browser to WebKit.

Company 100: Company 100 has contributed code to WebKit as part of work on Dorothy Browser since 2009. This work includes portability, performance, bug fixes, improvements to support mobile and embedded devices. Company 100 has ported WebKit to BREW MP and other mobile platforms.

University of Szeged: The Department of Software Engineering at the University of Szeged, Hungary started to work on WebKit in mid 2008. The first major contribution was the ARMv5 port of the JavaScript JIT engine. Since then, several other areas of WebKit have been tackled: memory allocation, parsers, regular expressions, SVG. Currently, the Department is maintaining the official Qt build bots and the Qt early warning system.

Samsung: Samsung has contributed code to WebKit EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) especially in the area of bug fixes, HTML5, EFL WebView, etc. Samsung is maintaining the official Efl build bots and the EFL early warning system.”

So, we see fierce competitors (Apple, Nokia, Google, Samsung) co-operating in a project that is clearly of interest for all of them. In a previous post I made a similar analysis for IGEL (popular developers of thin clients) and HP/Palm:

“The actual results are:

Total published source code (without modifications) for IGEL: 1.9GB in 181 packages; total amount of patch code: 51MB in 167 files (the remaining files are not modified). Average patch size: 305KB, Patch percentage on total publisheed code: 2.68%

Total published source code (without modifications) for Palm: 1.2GB in 106 packages; total amount of patch code: 55MB in 83 files (the remaining files are not modified). Average patch size: 664KB, Patch percentage on total published code: 4.58%

If we add the proprietary parts and the code modified we end up in the same approximate range found in the Maemo study, that is around 10% to 15% of code that is either proprietary or modified OSS directly developed by the company. IGEL reused more than 50 million lines of code, modified or developed around 1.3 million lines of code. …. Open Source allows to create a derived product (in both case of substantial complexity) reducing the cost of development to 1/20, the time to market to 1/4, the total staff necessary to more than 1/4, and in general reduce the cost of maintaining the product after delivery. I believe that it would be difficult, for anyone producing software today, to ignore this kind of results.”

This is the real end result: it would be extremely difficult for companies to compete without the added advantage of Open Source. It is simply anti-economic to try to do everything from scratch, while competing companies work together on non-differentiating elements; for this reason it should not be considered a strange fact that Nokia is an important contributor to Google Android.

]]>http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/nokia-is-one-of-the-most-active-android-contributors-and-other-surprises/feed/29A small WebP testhttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/a-small-webp-test/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/a-small-webp-test/#commentsThu, 21 Apr 2011 10:18:46 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=621I was quite intrigued by the WebP image encoding scheme created by Google, and based on the idea of a single-frame WebM movie. I performed some initial tests during initial release, and found it to be good but probably not groundbreaking. But I recently had the opportunity to read a blog post by Charles Bloom with some extensive tests, that showed that WebP was clearly on a par with a good Jpeg implementation on medium and high bitrates, but substantially better for small bitrates or constrained encodings. Another well executed test is linked there, and provide a good comparison between WebP, Jpeg and Jpeg2000, that again shows that WebP shines – really – in low bitrate condition. So, I decided to see if it was true, took some photos out of my trusted Nokia N97 and tried to convert them in a sensible way. Before flaming me about the fact that the images were not in raw format: I know it, thank you. My objective is not to perform a perfect test, but to verify Google assumptions that WebP can be used to reduce the bandwidth consumed by traditional, already encoded images while preserving most of the visual quality. This is not a quality comparison, but a “field test” to see if the technology works as described. The process I used is simple: I took some photos (I know, I am not a photographer…) selected for a mix of detail and low gradient areas; compressed them to 5% using GIMP with all Jpeg optimization enabled, took notice of size, then encoded the same source image with the WebP cwebp encoder without any parameter twiddling using the “-size” command line to match the size of the compressed Jpeg file. The WebP image was then decoded as PNG. The full set was uploaded to Flickr here, and here are some of the results:

There is an obvious conclusion: at small file sizes, WebP handily beats Jpeg (and a good Jpeg encoder, the libjpeg-based one used by GIMP) by a large margin. Using a jpeg recompressor and repacker it is possible to even a little bit the results, but only marginally. With some test materials, like cartoons and anime, the advantage increases substantially. I can safely say that, given these results, WebP is a quite effective low-bitrate encoder, with substantial size advantages over Jpeg.

]]>http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/a-small-webp-test/feed/1On Symbian, Communities, and Motivationhttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/on-symbian-communities-and-motivation/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/on-symbian-communities-and-motivation/#commentsThu, 07 Apr 2011 06:43:52 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=610(This is an updated repost of an article originally published on OSBR)

I have followed with great interest the evolution of the Symbian open source project – from its start, through its tentative evolution, and up to its closure this month. This process of closing down is accompanied by the claim that: “the current governance structure for the Symbian platform – the foundation – is no longer appropriate.”

It seems strange. Considering the great successes of Gnome, KDE, Eclipse, and many other groups, it is curious that Symbian was not able to follow along the same path. I have always been a great believer in OSS consortia, because I think that the sharing of research and development is a main strength of the open source model, and I think that consortia are among the best ways to implement R&D sharing efficiently.

However, to work well, Consortia need to provide benefits in terms of efficiency or visibility to all the actors that participate in them, not only to the original developer group. For Nokia, we know that one of the reasons to open up Symbian was to reduce the porting effort. As Eric Raymond reports, “they did a cost analysis and concluded they couldn’t afford the engineering hours needed to port Symbian to all the hardware they needed to support. (I had this straight from a Symbian executive, face-to-face, around 2002).”

But to get other people to contribute their work, you need an advantage for them as well. What can this advantage be? For Eclipse, most of the companies developing their own integrated development environment (IDE) found it economically sensible to drop their own work and contribute to Eclipse instead. It allowed them to quickly reduce their maintenance and development costs while increasing their quality as well. The Symbian foundation should have done the same thing, but apparently missed the mark, despite having a large number of partners and members. Why?

The reason is time and focus. The Eclipse foundation had, for quite some time, basically used only IBM resources to provide support and development. In a similar way, it took WebKit (which is not quite a foundation, but follows the same basic model) more than two years before it started receiving substantial contributions, as can be found here.

And WebKit is much, much smaller than Symbian and Eclipse. For Symbian, I would estimate that it would require at least three or four years before such a project could start to receive important external contributions. That is, unless it is substantially re-engineered so that the individual parts (some of which are quite interesting and advanced, despite the claims that Symbian is a dead project) can be removed and reused by other projects as well. This is usually the starting point for long-term cooperation. Some tooling was also not in place from the beginning; the need for a separate compiler chain – one that was not open source and that in many aspect was not as advanced as open source ones – was an additional stumbling block that delayed participation.

Another problem was focus. More or less, anyone understood that for a substantial period of time, Symbian would be managed and developed mainly by Nokia. And Nokia made a total mess of differentiating what part of the platform was real, what was a stopgap for future changes, what was end-of-life, and what was the future. Who would invest, in the long term, in a platform where the only entity that could gain from it was not even that much committed to it? And before flaming me for this comment, let me say that I am a proud owner of a Nokia device, I love most Nokia products, and I think that Symbian still could have been a contender, especially through a speedier transition to Qt for the user interface. But the long list of confusing announcements and delays, changes in plans, and lack of focus on how to beat the competitors like iOS and Android clearly reduced the willingness of commercial partners to invest in the venture.

Which is a pity – Symbian still powers most phones in the world and can still enter the market with some credibility. But this later announcement sounds like a death knell. Obtain the source code through a DVD or USB key? You must be kidding. Do you really think that setting up a webpage with the code and preserving a read-only Mercurial server would be a too much of a cost? The only thing that it shows is that Nokia stopped believing in an OSS Symbian.

(Update: after the change of CEO and the extraordinary change in strategy, it is clear that the reason for ditching the original EPL code was related to its inherent patent grant, that still provides a safeguard against Nokia patents embedded in the original Symbian code. There is a new release of Symbian under a different, non-OSS license; the original code is preserved in this sourceforge project, while Tyson Key preserved the incubation projects and many ancillary documentation like wiki pages at this Google code project.)

A full copy of the original EPL

]]>http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/on-symbian-communities-and-motivation/feed/4The neverending quest to prove Google evilness. Why?http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/the-neverending-quest-to-prove-google-evilness-why/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/the-neverending-quest-to-prove-google-evilness-why/#commentsTue, 22 Mar 2011 09:53:04 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=600Ah, my favorite online nemesis (in a good sense, as we have always a respectful and fun way of having a disagreement) Florian Mueller is working full-time to demonstrate, in his own words, “a clear pattern of extensive GPL laundering by Google, which should worry any manufacturer or developer who cares about the IP integrity of Android and its effect on their proprietary extensions or applications. It should also be of significant concern to those who advocate software freedom.” Wow. Harsh words, at that, despite the fact that Linus Torvalds himself dismissed the whole thing with “It seems totally bogus. We’ve always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too” (he also, amusingly, suggested that “If it’s some desperate cry for attention by somebody, I just wish those people would release their own sex tapes or something, rather than drag the Linux kernel into their sordid world”. Ah, I love him.)

In fact, I expressed the same point to Florian directly (both in email and in a few tweets), but it seems very clear that the man is on a crusade, given how he describes Google actions: “the very suspect copying of Linux headers and now these most recent discoveries, it’s hard not to see an attitude. There’s more to this than just nonchalance. Is it hubris? Or recklessness? A lack of managerial diligence?” or “It reduces the GPL to a farce — like a piece of fence in front of which only fools will stop, while “smart” people simply walk around it.”

Well, there is no such thing, and I am not saying this because I am a Google fanboy (heck, I even have a Nokia phone ) but because this full-blown tempest is actually useless, and potentially damaging for the OSS debate.

I will start with the core of Florian arguments:

Google took GPL code headers;

they “sanitized” it with a script to remove copyrighted information,

what is left is not GPL anymore (in particular, is not copyrighted).

Which Florian sees as a way to “work around” the GPL. Well, it’s not, and there are sensible reasons for saying this. Let’s look at one of the incriminated files:

What can we say of that? They contain interfaces, definitions, constants that are imposed by compatibility or efficiency reasons. For this reason, they are not copyrightable, or more properly would be excluded in the standard test for copyright infringement, in the abstraction-filtration test. In fact, it would not be possible to guarantee compatibility without such an expression.

But – Florian guesses – the authors put a copyright notice on top! That means that it must be copyrighted! In fact, he claims “The fact that such notices are added to header files shows that the authors of the programs in question consider the headers copyrightable. Also, without copyright, there’s no way to put material under a license such as the GPL.”

Actually it’s simply not true. I can take something, add in the beginning a claim of copyright, but that does not imply that I have a real copyright on that. Let’s imagine that I write a file containing one number, and put a (c) notice on top. Do I have a copyright on that number? No, because the number is not copyrightable itself. The same for the headers included before: to test for copyright infringement, you must first remove all material that is forced for standard compatibility, then Scenes a Faire (a principle in copyright law that says that certain elements of a creative work are not protected when they are mandated by or customary for an environment), then code that cannot be alternatively expressed for performance reasons. What is left is potential copyright infringement. Now, let’s apply the test to the code I have pasted. What is left? Nothing. Which is why, up to now, most of the commentators (that are working on the kernel) mentioned that this was also just a big, large, interesting but ultimately useless debate.

In fact, in the BlueZ group the same view was presented:

“#include <bluetooth/bluetooth.h> is only an interface contract. It contains only constants and two trivial macros. Therefore there is no obligation for files that include bluetooth.h to abide by the terms of the GPL license. We will soon replace bluetooth.h with an alternate declaration of the interface contract that does not have the GPL header, so that this confusion does not arise again.” (Nick Pelly)

It is interesting that this comes, in and out, in many projects and several times; it happened in Wine (in importing vs. recoding Windows header definitions) and I am sure in countless others. The real value of this debate would be not to claim that Google nearly certainly is an horrible, profiteering parasite that steals GPL code, but to verify that the headers used do not contain copyrighted material, because that would be an extremely negative thing. Has this happened? Up to now, I am still unable to find a single example. Another, totally different thing is asking if this is impolite – taking without explicitly asking permission on a mailing list, for example. But we are not looking at headlines like “Google is impolite”, we are looking at “Google’s Android faces a serious Linux copyright issue”, or “More evidence of Google’s habit of GPL laundering in Android”.

That’s not constructive – that’s attention seeking. I would really love to see a debate about copyrightability of header files (I am not claiming that *all* header files are not copyrightable, of course) or copyrightability of assembly work (the “Yellow Book” problem). But such a debate is not happening, or it is drowned under a deluge of “Google is evil” half proofs.

Of course, that’s my opinion.

]]>http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/the-neverending-quest-to-prove-google-evilness-why/feed/1App stores have no place in a web-apps worldhttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/app-stores-have-no-place-in-a-web-apps-world/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/app-stores-have-no-place-in-a-web-apps-world/#commentsMon, 14 Feb 2011 08:37:29 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=592I have read with great interest the latest Matt Asay’s post, “Enough with the Apple App Store apathy”, that provides a clear overview of why App Stores should be at the center of open source advocates’ rage. Matt is right (and some developers already started addressing this, like some of VLC project developers) but I believe that the current monopoly of app stores is just a temporary step in the wait for real web apps. App stores, in fact, do just a few things well; others not as well, and they take a hefty percentage of all transactions just because they can.

Let’s think about what an app store is about:

Discovery: one of the main advantages of a central point for searching applications is.. well… the fact that there is a single point for searching. Since developers, when submitting an app, need to perform a categorization or tagging it to make it searchable, an app store is actually quite helpful in finding something. Until there is too much of something. In fact, already in the iOS app store, and partially in the Android one, looking for something is increasingly a hit-and-miss affair, with lots and lots of similar (if not identical) applications trying desperately to emerge in the listing, or maybe to end up under the spotlight of some “best of” compilation. In fact, as Google would happily tell you, when you have too many things pure listings are not going to be useful; you need real search capabilities or some sort of manual suggestion (like social features, “I like it” or whatever). App stores are starting to get it, but they are insulated from the web – which means that they are unable to harness the vast, multifaceted amount of information created by tweeters, bloggers, journalists and pundits that watch and evaluate almost everything on the web. Discovery is now barely possible in a store with 100k apps; as things evolve, it will become even more difficult. In a world of web applications, well, this problem returns to a (very solvable) problem of finding something on the web. Ask Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, or more “intelligent” systems like Wolfram Alpha-they all seem to manage it quite well.

App updates: one very useful thing is the ability of an app store to send notifications of new apps, and help users in having all the update process done simply and in a single place. This is of course quite useful (just don’t claim that it is a novelty, or any YUM or APT user will jump straight at your neck), but again is totally irrelevant in a world of web apps – the app will just check for a new version, in case it uses persistent storage for caching JavaScript and includes, or simply go straight to the website of the application publisher. This also resolves the friction introduced by the app approval process in current App Stores: you submit it, and then pray If an update is urgent (for example for a security fix) you just have to try as much as possible to speed it up – it is not up to the developer, anyway.

App backups: in a world of apps, app backups are a great idea. In a world of web apps, backups are simply bookmarks, with the cacheable parts re-downloadable in any moment. Since both Chrome and Firefox do have already their own way of syncing bookmarks, this is covered as well.

Payments: this is quite an important part – and something that current web apps provide in an immature way. The Google Chrome web store do something like this, but it works only on Chrome and works only with Google; there is a need for some more high-level payment scheme embedded within web apps.

As I commented to Matt in his article, I still believe that app stores are a useful, albeit temporary step towards a more open and transparent infrastructure, that we all know and love: the web. And we will not have to forfeit 30% of all revenues to be on it.

]]>http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/app-stores-have-no-place-in-a-web-apps-world/feed/6OSS is about access to the codehttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/oss-is-about-access-to-the-code/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/oss-is-about-access-to-the-code/#commentsSun, 12 Dec 2010 17:01:01 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=574I have a kind of a fetish – the idea that source code, even old or extremely specific for a single use, may be useful for a long time. Not only for porting to some other, strange platform, but for issues like prior art in software patents, for getting inspiration for techniques or simply because you don’t know when it may be of use. For this reason, I try to create public access archives of source code I manage to get my hands on, especially when such codes may require a written license to acquire, but may then later be redistributed.

Up to now, I have prepared public archives of the following projects:

DOD OSCMIS: a very large web-based application (more than half a GB of code), created by the Defense Information Systems Agency of the US Department of Defense, and currently in use and supporting 16000 users (including some in critical areas of the world, like a tactical site in Iraq). I wrote a description here, and the source code was requested in writing during 2009. I am indebted to Richard Nelson, the real hero of such a great effort, for creating such a large scale release, that I hope will spur additional interest and contributions. I believe that I’m the only European licensee, up to now The source code is available at the SourceForge mirror: http://sourceforge.net/projects/disa-oscimis/

NASA CODES: One of my oldest collection-and recovered by pure chance. Many years ago, we used to order CDs with source code on it (would you imagine it? How victorian…) since downloading them through our 14.4KBaud modems would have required too much time. So I ordered the Walnut Creek CD archive of the NASA COSMIC source code archive, a collection of public domain codes (mostly in Fortran) for things like “Aeroelastic Analysis for Rotorcraft in Flight or in a Wind Tunnel”. They are mostly obsolete, but since COSMIC was turned into a money-making enterprise that requires quite a substantial amount of money, I enjoy the idea of providing an access to the original codes. The entire list of software descriptions is available here, and the codes are browsable at http://code.google.com/p/nasa-cosmic/source/browse/#svn/trunk.

Symbian: Ah, symbian. I already wrote about the high and lows of the Symbian OSS project, and since Nokia plans to shut down everything and make the source code accessible only through a direct request for an USB key or DVD, I though that an internet accessible archive would have been more… modern. It is a substantial, massive archive – I had to drop all Mercurial additions to make it fit in the space I had available, and still it amounts to 6.1Gb, Bzip-compressed. It is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbiandump/files/.

I have performed no modifications or changes on the source code, and it remains under its original licenses. I hope that it may be useful for others, or at least become a nice historical artifact.

]]>http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/oss-is-about-access-to-the-code/feed/5How to make yourself hated by academics.http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/how-to-make-yourself-hated-by-academics/
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/how-to-make-yourself-hated-by-academics/#commentsFri, 05 Nov 2010 12:07:34 +0000cdaffarahttp://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=568I have been talking about OSS for a long, long time, and my first public conference on the subject is still imprinted in my mind. It was at a very important post-universitary Italian school, with a renowned economic department, and I got invited to deliver a speech about EU activities in support of OSS, to an audience mainly composed of academics from sociology, economics, political science and such. Just after my talk, one of the professors started a lively debate, claiming that I was a “crypto-communist, deluded and trying to spread the false model of the gift economy upon IT”. Heck, I stopped talking for a moment – something that the people that knows me would find surprising (I tend to talk a lot, on things that I like). I had to think about the best way to answer, and was surprised to find that most of the audience shared the same belief. One professor mentioned that basic economic laws make the very idea of OSS impossible, or only a temporary step towards a market readjustment, and so on.

Guess what? They were wrong. And not wrong a little – wrong a lot (but it took me a few years to demonstrate it).

And so, after all these years, I still find sometimes academics that improvise on the subject, claiming certainty of their models; models that, usually, include hidden assumptions that are more myth and folklore than science. Thankfully for the many ones that are not subject to this faults (Dirk Riehle comes to mind, as Rishab Gosh, Paul David, Francesco Rullani, Cristina Rossi, and many others) we have real data to present and show. I still sometimes open my talks with a mention from “Government policy toward open source software”, a book from AEI-Brookings where Evans claims that “The GPL effectively prevents profit-making firms from using any of the code since all derivative products must also be distributed under the GPL license”. Go tell that to RedHat.

Now, I have a new contender for inclusion in my slides; an article from Sebastian von Engelhardt and Stephen M. Maurer, that you can find in all its glory here. I will try to dissect some of the claims that are hidden in the paper, and that for example push the authors towards “imposing a fixed, lump-sum tax on OS firms and using the proceeds to subsidize their [proprietary software] competitors”. I think that Microsoft would love that – a tax on RedHat, Google, IBM! What can be more glorious than that?

I will pinpoint some of the most evident problems:

“For this reason, the emergence of fundamentally new, “open source” (OS) methods for producing software in the 1990s surprised and delighted observers.” Actually, as I wrote for example here, the tradition of collaborative development of software far predates Stallman and Raymond, and was the norm along with the creation of “user” (more appropriately “developer”) groups like SHARE (Society to Help Avoid Redundant Efforts, founded in 1955 and centered on IBM systems) and DECUS (for Digital Equipment computers and later for HP systems), both still alive. Code was also commonly shared in academic journals, like the famous “Algorithms” column of the “Communications of the ACM” journal. It was the emergence of the shrinkwrapped software market in the eighties that changed this approach, and introduced the “closed” approach, where only the software firm produces software. This is actually an illusion: in Europe, the market for shrinkwrapped software is only 19% of the total software+services marker, with own-developed software at 29%. We will return upon this number later.

“This made it natural to ask whether OS could drastically improve welfare compared to CS. At first, this was only an intuition. Early explanations of OS were either ad hoc (“altruism”) or downright mysterious (e.g. a post-modern “gift economy”). [Raymond 1999] Absent a clear model of OS, no one could really be certain how much software the new incentive could deliver, let alone whether social welfare would best be served by OS, CS, or some mix of the two.” Argh. I understand the fact that my papers are not that famous, but there are several excellent works that show that OSS is about the economics of production, and not politics, ideology or “gif economies”.

“economists showed that real world OS collaborations rely on many different incentives such as education, signaling, and reputation.” See? No economic incentives. People collaborate to show their prowess, or improve their education. Actually, this applies only to half of the OSS population, since the other half is paid to work on OSS – something that the article totally ignores.

“We model the choice between OS and CS as a two-stage game. In Stage 1, profit-maximizing firms decide between joining an OS collaboration or writing CS code for their own use. In Stage 2 they develop a complementary product, for example a DVD player or computer game, whose performance depends on the code. The firms then sell the bundled products in markets that include one or more competitors.” So, they are describing either a R&D sharing effort or an Open Core model (it is not well explained). They are simply ignoring every other possible model, something that I have already covered in detail in the past. They also ignore the idea that a company may contribute to OSS for their own internal product, not for selling it; something that is in itself much bigger than the market for shrinkwrapped software (remember the 29% mentioned before?) and that is totally forgotten in the later discussion on welfare.

“OS only realizes the full promise of cost-sharing when CS firms are present”. This is of course false: R&D sharing is always present every time there is a cooperation across a source base. But the article mentions only a simplistic model that assumes a OS company and a proprietary company (they insist in calling it Commercial Software, which is not).

There is a large, underlying assumptions: that OSS is produced now only by companies that create Open Core-like products. The reality is that this is not true (something that was for example found in the last CAOS report from the excellent Matthew Aslett) and the exclusion of users-developers makes any model that tries to extract welfare totally unreliable.

Ahh, I feel better. Now I have another university where I will never be invited